By Steve Moran
A nursing home in Denver had a lateness policy for years. Be late, get a mark. Get a second mark. Keep going, and the consequences got real, up to losing your job.
Then the leaders started talking to the people who were late. And they discovered something really important. Most of the time, there was a real reason.
They realized work is not school, and progressive discipline treats hardworking adults like children.
They decided to stop punishing. Before they did anything else, lateness fell by 50 percent. Annual turnover, which was already super low, fell to 11 percent.
For context, the average nursing home replaces about half of its direct care staff every year (theconsumervoice).
Think About It
They simply removed what was making the problem worse.
That’s the idea behind a lot of behavior science. Angela Duckworth’s new book, Situated, builds on it. Situations wield enormous influence over what we do, and we are mostly oblivious to it (angeladuckworth).
Sometimes the fix is a fly etched into a urinal at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, after signs asking men to aim straight had little effect. Sometimes it’s rumble strips… Michigan put them on about 5,400 miles of rural highway and saw a 47 percent drop in the crashes they target (taylorfrancisdot). And sometimes it’s taking a rule away.
Now think about your team. You’ve probably tried the speech. The email about being on time. The all-hands about attitude. How did that go?
This week’s Do This starts with an uncomfortable question. Is one of your own rules causing the behavior you hate?
It takes about an hour to set up and costs almost nothing. It also comes with a rule that tells you when the problem is the environment and when it’s actually the person.
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